The Lawyer Suing Fox For Fake Seth Rich Story Just Gave Trump Awful News

The Lawyer Suing Fox For Fake Seth Rich Story Just Gave Trump Awful News

It looks like Donald Trump will be making frequent trips between the White House and the courthouse now that he was caught telling Fox News to publish a fake news story about the tragic death of former DNC staffer Seth Rich, heavily implying that he had been murdered by the Clintons for releasing the emails from the DNC that we know were in fact hacked by the Russian government.

Since the case involves presidential statements to the FBI in the wake of the Comey firing, it could become yet another area of focus for the Special Counsel investigation.

A Republican donor linked to Steve Bannon sparked the lawsuit by stage-managing and funding a deceptive national investigatory effort into DNC staffer Seth Rich’s tragic death.

That donor, Ed Butowsky, even met with Trump’s now ex-Press Secretary Sean Spicer at the White House about publishing the anti-Clinton propaganda about Rich in Fox News. The outgoing White House official is also on the list of people to be deposed under oath for testimony. Yahoo reports:

The lawyer for a Washington private investigator who is suing Fox News over its use of allegedly invented quotes in a news story advancing a bizarre conspiracy theory said Tuesday he will seek to depose President Trump and former White House press secretary Sean Spicer to question them over their roles in the affair.

“We’re going to litigate this case as we would any other,” and that means “we’ll want to depose anyone who has information,” including the president, said attorney Douglas Wigdor, who is representing the investigator, Rod Wheeler.

Thanks to the legal decision Clinton vs. Jones, Trump lacks any kind of presidential immunity from this kind of civil lawsuit.

One week after Fox’s deplorable attempt to curry favor with the president and distract the public from the investigation into Trump and team’s alleged collusion with agents of the Russian Federation, they retracted the story.

But it’s been months and nobody has been fired at Fox News.

Putting Trump on the stand under will quickly expose the appalling nexus between the Trump team and the media network sworn to do its bidding. Lawyers will use the discovery process to request documents from the White House like appointment books, visitor logs, security checks and other information tying the President to the defamatory news story.

Because this story vividly illustrates that the President is actively involved in spreading deliberate misinformation to the public, it’s very likely that Special Counsel Mueller will use the publicly available documents and testimony from this case in his massive criminal probe of Donald Trump.

WATCH: Ex-Bush Adviser – ‘If You Think Iraq Was A Bad War, Wait Until You See Iran’

WATCH: Ex-Bush Adviser – ‘If You Think Iraq Was A Bad War, Wait Until You See Iran’

President Donald Trump has based nearly his entire political identity on positioning himself as the opposite of former President Barack Obama – the racist birther movement was the beginning of Trump’s foray into politics, and his obsession with disassembling the Affordable Care Act is probably his most publicized.

However, a former adviser to President George W. Bush seems to think that Trump’s desire to undermine his predecessor becomes most frightening when dealing with the Iran nuclear deal. He claims Trump, and complicit Republicans, will lead us into a deadly war with Iran.

Retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff to Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell, appeared on MSNBC’s AM Joy and stated that Trump and his congressional apologists are deliberately setting up for years of war with North Korea and the Middle East. He told MSNBC host Joy Reid:

“I think we are doing the same thing as we did in 2003, and I was very intimate with that process in Iraq. We are marching down the road to war. If you think Iraq was a bad war wait until you see Iran.”

Wilkerson argued that Saudi Arabia, a country which Trump’s team has shown all manner of favor towards, is actually the country destabilizing the Middle East, claiming:

“The Saudis are far worse than Iran and we are getting ready to make that situation even worse, more profoundly destabilizing, by taking on Iran militarily.”

Wilkerson was heavily involved with Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein, and he knows a thing or two about twisting intelligence and public perception to lead a country into war. He left Reid speechless with this ominous warning to our troops:

“I will tell every GI out there: You have had 17 straight years of war, get ready for 17 more.”

Watch Wilkerson’s conversation with Reid below. Is America great again?

For more than half a century, Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird” has been a staple of eighth and ninth-grade English classes around the country. It’s also been a fixture on lists of banned and challenged books due to its brutally honest depictions of racism and rape. According to the American Library Association, it was the 21st most-challenged book in the first decade of the new millennium.

Well, add another challenge to the list. Late last week, school officials in Biloxi, Mississippi removed “To Kill A Mockingbird” from the eighth grade language arts reading list. According to school board vice president Kenny Holloway, school officials had fielded a number of complaints that “there was some language in the book that makes people uncomfortable.” Ultimately, administration and English department officials concluded that they could “teach the same lesson with other books.”

While Holloway didn’t elaborate, the (Biloxi) Sun Herald received an email from one parent at Biloxi Junior High School that may have provided something of an explanation. According to the parent, eighth graders were still reading “To Kill A Mockingbird” when the decision was made to yank it from the curriculum. Now, according to this parent, they won’t be allowed to finish it “due to the use of the N-word.” This parent called the move “one of the most disturbing examples of censorship I have ever heard.”

“Disturbing” is being kind to it. This book teaches a number of important lessons–such as the need to have compassion and empathy for everyone, regardless of race or economic background. It also lays threadbare the outrageous reality of racism and prejudice in the Depression-era Deep South, and does so through the eyes of children. For those who don’t recall, Scout Finch, her brother Jem, and their friend Dill are forced to mature and quickly after seeing absolute evil first hand. If that makes people “uncomfortable,” it actually proves why kids in Biloxi need to be exposed to this classic.

A lot of people are of the same mind. The reaction in the Twitterverse has been unsparing.

A Mississippi HS is removing To Kill a Mockingbird because it makes people uncomfortable, yet this is the flag they fly out front daily. pic.twitter.com/8cQ5lwxDzT

— Hugh Jass (@CelticWombat) October 14, 2017

If reading To Kill a Mockingbird makes you uncomfortable, you’re exactly the kind of person who needs to read it.

— Resistance Mom 🖖❄️ (@ResistBLOTUS) October 14, 2017

“To Kill a Mockingbird” was removed from school reading lists in Mississippi for making people “uncomfortable”. If “To Kill a Mockingbird” & talking about different races deserve empathy makes you that uncomfortable, you should probably be reading “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) October 15, 2017

“To Kill a Mockingbird” should be mandatory reading for EVERY teen living in southern states.

It makes you uncomfortable?

Good.

— brandi (boo)nd (@brandithecat) October 15, 2017

These aren’t just the objections of “outside agitators,” though. The decision doesn’t seem to be playing very well on the Mississippi Gulf Coast either.

The Sun Herald editorial board blasted the decision, saying that the school board had denied eighth graders a chance to understand why, in the words of Atticus Finch, “reasonable people go stark raving mad” whenever race is even discussed. The Facebook comments sections for both the original article and the editorial are, with virtually no exceptions, filled with people blasting this decision.

Considering this area’s history, this is very refreshing. The Gulf Coast was one of the first areas of the South where the old-line Democrats started turning their backs on the national party after it became more receptive to civil rights. It has since become one of the most Republican areas of the South. Harrison County, home to Biloxi, has not supported a Democrat for president since 1960.

If the reaction to this decision is any indication, though, it does appear that the people in this area do have some standards. While the book is still available at the Biloxi Junior High library, district officials should be ashamed at their apparent decision to cave in to a few snowflakes.

Hopefully someone at either Biloxi Junior High or Biloxi High has the guts to allow their kids to continue reading this book, or at the very least allow them to watch the Oscar-winning film version that came out in 1962 and stars Gregory Peck as Atticus. Of course, though, the only real way to right this wrong is for the Biloxi school board to grow a pair and put this book back in the curriculum. Let them have it on the Web, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

(featured image: screenshot courtesy Universal Pictures, part of public domain)

Taking a break from trying to remember whether or not President Donald Trump ever admitted to committing sexual assault, the hosts of Fox & Friends turned their shrieking ire to a new target: children’s cartoon Thomas and Friends.

Specifically, it is Thomas and Friends’ addition of two female characters that have ruffled the F&F feathers. Host Pete Hegseth really kicked things off with this brilliant observation, sputtering as he tried to string together an argument.:

“Traditionally, boys have probably loved trains and girls probably do too. But there are more boy engines than girl engines. They’re balancing it out. They’re getting rid of two of the males and replacing them with female trains, one from Africa. And then the other changes — they are going to make Thomas more sustainable. He’s going to follow U.N. goals and stop polluting so much, and start being more environmentally friendly.”

This then launches into an argument about allowing “childhood to be childhood,” because, apparently, a show that includes female anthropomorphic train engines is too much for some children to deal with. Male anthropomorphic train engines that love polluting, however, are just fine.

Host David Webb continued to express his concern for our children, trying to clarify his anti-female train stance:

“I’m not against girl or boy trains or any trains. I would like to see a nice high-speed train represented, whatever the case may be. You know, Abby, I just don’t see the agenda being the driver.”

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Third host Abby Huntsman is the lone voice of reason in the discussion, arguing that gender equality in the cartoon train world is okay by her, all while her co-hosts attempt to interrupt her:

“Adding more women faces to trains, as a woman, I think that’s great. Also, clean energy, I’m all for clean energy in this country. I’m all for being more energy independent in this country. So, if this is something to be worried about, I just don’t know if that’s on the top of my list.”

“Does that kill childhood, though? Because I know I’m about to have a girl and to read her that book or show her that, I don’t think that ends her childhood.”

Adding women to popular entertainment has long ruffled the skirts of the far right; alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was booted off Twitter for (among other things) directing his fans to harass actor Leslie Jones, who was starring in the female reboot of Ghostbusters.

Keep in mind that this was a four minute segment on President Trump’s favorite morning news show, and it was discussing if the children of the United States are being indoctrinated because they added female trains to an animated children’s show. Watch the unbelievable exchange below, and especially note Abby Huntsman trying not to laugh in Pete Hegseth’s face as he introduces the segment: